


The Dew Will Settle on our Graves

by Katowisp



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Background Ellen Harvelle, Caring John Winchester, Dean Winchester is Sam Winchester's Parent, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Love, Military Background, POV Castiel (Supernatural), Protective Castiel, Protective Dean Winchester, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-10-30 01:57:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17819633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katowisp/pseuds/Katowisp
Summary: Castiel finds a photo album that belonged to the Singers, when they were young. He adds the last photo.-Circa season 5. Coda to Season 5, episode 10





	The Dew Will Settle on our Graves

_Maybe when our story's over_  
We'll go where it's always spring   
The band is playing our song again   
All the world is green  
-Tom Waits

In a lopsided cupboard nearly completely obscured by piles of books heavily laden by old dust, there was a picture album shoved haphazardly among the textbooks. It hadn’t been touched in years, and it was covered in the deep dust that marked books Bobby had either deliberately, or intentionally, forgotten about it.

But the dust was a poor camouflage. Its contents weren’t filled with ghastly deaths, or marked by legends and myths and fear. On its weathered pages, sticky and yellow with time, photos were tucked carefully into faded tabs. Faded, smiling people looked back with grinning eyes. Many of them were young. All were alive. 

There were two scripts that denoted the people. The first was a careful cursive, marking the smiling faces as people and not strangers. A careful narration described the date, location, and content of the photo. 

_John and Mary Winchester on their Wedding Day, Lawrence, Kansas, 1973._

The young couple appeared happy, even though Castiel knew the sorrow and grief that lurked behind Mary’s smile. John was crisp in his Alphas, the uniform neatly and carefully pressed, his medals and ribbons proudly displayed. Mary’s hair was carefully plaited and she wore a dress with a high neck and low waist. The dress had now faded to cream. He touched the photo, and the room fell away, replaced by laughter and clapping as the two finished their kiss and smiled at the camera. They were married beneath an arch, and Mary wore a garland of flowers, her feet bare. Her bright white dress, lined with lace, was yellowing from where it touched the grass and dirt. She moved a lock of hair away from John’s face. 

“I love you, my love.”

He kissed the top of her head. “I love you, too.”

_John, Mary Winchester, Bobby and Karen Singer (me), Grand Canyon trip, 1975_

His hand hovered over the diluted oranges of the Grand Canyon.

Mary stood beside her husband, her arm wrapped around him. Her mouth was open—she had been saying something when the picture had snapped that moment in time. Castiel touched the picture, and Mary’s bright voice filled the room. 

“—we’re not hiking the ‘whole damn thing’—just the Angel Trail, Bobby, and that rail is there so you won’t fall over the edge,” The laughter in her voice belied the sharpness of her words. 

John laughed, his voice deep and throaty. 

“It’s not very high,” a young, fit, and grumpy Bobby pushed the railing. “And it wobbles!” But his tone lacked bite as he tried to hide his nervousness. 

Castiel lifted his hand, and the memory bled away. The dank room fell upon his again, and Castiel felt claustrophobic after being on the edge of a canyon, whose floor was thousands of feet away. 

He remembered when it had been a trickling spring, before determination and time had allowed it to carve its way into the earth. 

The Winchesters, Bobby and Karen Singer (me), Denver, Colorado, 1976. Bicentennial celebration.

The proud strands of a Sousa March swelled with tempo and shrill piccolos, and what the band lacked in skill, they made up for in enthusiasm. 

“Oh, they’re so bad,” Mary laughed. She waved an American flag and waved at Miss Pioneer as she marched by, a bevvy of young girls trailing her in dress of red, white, and blue. They threw confetti as they danced along. 

John pulled her into a kiss. “Two hundred years, Mary!”

“You’re acting as if you were there for all of it!”

“Oh, you can never take that pride out of a Marine,” Karen interjected, tugging on Bobby’s arm with fondness. He pecked her on her forehead, brushing the strands of her hair back gently. 

Ellen and Bill Harvelle, Bobby Singer, at their recently purchased “The Road House”, Nebraska. 1978

The sky was a dusty orange as the sun set over the distant horizon. The song of thousands of crickets and katy-dids lifted from the fields. The road in front of the bar was empty, but headlights in the distance indicated their possible first customer was on his way. Bill held Ellen tightly—they were both so young, and their lives were filled with possibilities. Castiel had never met Bill, but he imagined he had been an amazing man. While they were celebrating their new purchase, Castiel had been a dutiful footsoldier in Heaven’s Army, and he had regarded humans as beneath his attention. He wished now he had spent more of his time among them. Bobby stood beside them, looking mildly aggravated. 

“Karen, come on and get in the picture, woman!” 

“Oh, just hold still, Bobby! I’ll be in the next one!” The viewfinder strayed as Karen moved the camera to stick her tongue out at her husband. 

“Do you think he’ll stop by?” Bill nodded to the oncoming car. “Shit, you don’t think we made a mistake? We’re in the middle of nowhere. What were we thinking?” He looked back at the roadhouse. 

“Oh, just smile, for heavens sake, Bill,” Ellen elbowed him fondly. “We put the work into it, and we put the word out. It’s the only stop for fifty miles. People will come. They gotta eat, and we’ve got a pretty good fry cook, or so you say.” She waggled her brows. 

_The Winchesters, Harvelles, and us. Grand Rapids on our Western Road Trip. 1979._

“Jesus, it’s bright,” Bobby had his hand up, clasped over his eyes. The corners had begun to show signs of the fine lines that would gradually deepen into those of the man Castiel knew. But for now, he was still a young man, and the lines around his mouth were forming from years of smiling and laughter. His cheeks were ruddy from too much sun, and his arms were bronze from his time outside. 

Karen reached over and pulled her husband’s down, a smile on her face. Her face was cast in shadow by the large-brimmed straw hat she wore. The prairie wind pulled at her sundress, rippling the loud, printed sunflowers that had been so endemic in the 70s. 

“You can just squint, Bobby,” Ellen grinned. 

Karen laughed, adjusting her dress. “Should’ve worn a hat, honey. You can wear my sunglasses.” She pulled off the huge, bug-eyed lens, and Bobby swatted them away. 

“Next place we stop, I’m getting one. There’s not a cloud in the sky.”

Karen sighed happily. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Bobby pulled Karen in, knocking her hat askew as he kissed her. “You’re beautiful!”

Grand Rapids faded. The sun and heat and dust from thirty years ago replaced with an uncomfortable chill that wasn’t purely due to the temperature. 

Castiel browsed the album. When he touched one, the brief memory that accompanied the shot filled the room, banishing the grief and sorrow that now resided in the old floorboards and faded wallpaper. He came to know Ellen before she was hardened and bitter, when she had a sharp wit and biting humor that gave way in the face of absolute love and tenderness for Bill. 

He came to know a young John, healing from his time in the war, patched together by the careful stitch work of Mary. She kept the truth behind her own grief a secret, and loved John even more deeply than he knew. He stood tall as her last attachments to sanity and normality. 

Bobby was gruff and nervous, jumpy from Vietnam. He didn’t like fire works. He loved his salvage yard and Karen. She was a cook, second to none, and baked a strawberry-rhubarb pie that was famous across South Dakota fairs. She’d won a blue ribbon at the state fair in 1978. 

Castiel looked at the simple, neatly written narratives. 

They read like epitaphs now. 

Then, in 1980, the neat handwriting ended. The faded pages no longer contained the young, smiling faces of the Singers and their friends. 

There was a significant gap in time before the archiving was taken up again. The newer photographs weren’t so grainy, and they looked odd against the ancient paper. The handwriting was different, too—a concentrated scrawl, spidery and nearly angry. But the subjects dampened the residual hate and grief behind the ink. 

_Dean and Sam, 1986._

Dean, mouth in a thin line, one hand clasped tightly around Sam’s, looked at the photographer with barely veiled contempt. Castiel hadn’t intended to pry into Dean’s early life, but the contrary expression on his face tugged at Castiel’s newly found curiosity. He touched it. 

“Dean, all you have to do is smile.” The boys were standing in front of broken down cars that were slowly replacing the tended gardens that Karen had grown her vegetables in. A busted Camaro stood where the strawberry patch had been. Bobby’s hobby had become his sole focus, as if he could bury the memories of his wife with broken cars. As if that was better. 

“I don’t want to. I don’t want pictures taken. Dad says they steal people’s souls.” He tugged on Sam’s arm, Sam stood quietly beside him, a strange toddler at best. He was studying a beetle crawling across the ground, and Castiel could see the conflict on the toddler’s face. He wanted to follow after the beetle, but he had been trained to stay by his brother’s side. Bobby knew even less what to do with him than with Dean. 

“Not all cameras that do that, Dean. This camera is not a soul stealing camera,” Bobby explained patiently from behind the lens. “Your daddy dropped you all off here, and I know he’ll want pictures of this one day.”

“Dad doesn’t need pictures. He can remember everything perfectly,” Dean declared, sticking his chin up. 

Bobby snorted. “Humor me, boy.” 

_Dean, practicing knots, July, 1986_

“Bobby, they’re all tied up and it’s dumb,” Dean declared. That’s what Dean was. A Declarer. He got something in his head and he’d declare about it all day long. 

Bobby felt a headache coming on. He set the camera down to rub his forehead and he sighed heavily. “Your brother’s good at it, and he’s three.”

Dean looked over at Sam who was drooling on the ropes. Still, Sam had somehow managed to get two strings apart, and he was now working on the second set. Dean’s eyebrows rose in surprise, and he turned back to work on his own ropes quietly and diligently. 

_Sam getting into the flour, March, 1987._

Bobby had been angry at first, and then helplessly amused. The salt was too high for Sam’s reach, and instead the boy had found the flour, kept in the cupboard that had been left open a crack. Karen had brought home a kitten once from a litter out in the barn. The momma cat hadn’t come home, and a fox had gotten the rest of the kittens, but one had survived. He was mostly orange, except for his hind legs, which were black. It looked like he was wearing pants, and she called him Trousers. That cat had gotten into everything, and had quickly sussed out that if he pried the pantry open, it opened a whole new world for him to explore. As if the state of South Dakota wasn’t enough. 

These boys were exactly the same way. 

When Bobby returned from the salvage yard, Dean was sitting with crossed arms at the kitchen table. Sam was diligently setting lines of flour at the doors and windows. 

“It’s not the same, Sam,” Dean said. “We need salt.”

Sam stopped his work to blow a raspberry. “This works fine,” Sam said, dropping the white powder down and patting it as best he could. “It’s white, too. Bobby needs be protec’ted.”

Their hearts were in the right place, and he couldn’t fault them that. Instead, he grabbed the Minolta camera on the counter. 

 

It was two childhoods spottily but lovingly documented.

The photo album ended abruptly when the boys reached adolescence. 

But on the very last page was a somber photo six very serious people accepting, but uncomfortable in their fate. They were Castiel’s first human friends, and maybe all he had left. And now that number was down by two. 

Without the comfort of Heaven’s Embrace, Castiel understood the sorrow humans felt when the lost a loved one. He studied each face, recognizing the lines in Ellen’s mouth now as laugh lines from a youth well spent, worn deep by a later grief. He touched Bobby’s face. 

Bobby couldn’t maintain the pretense of strength or flippancy in the face of death. His haunted eyes were unfocused, seeing a dozen friends that had stood before that very camera, but never would again. 

Castiel gently pressed the photo into the paper, the two fusing together. It wasn’t much, but it would protect the photo from aging the way the others had. He may have lost his ability to banish demons, but he still had control of the smaller powers. Still, it was distressing that the corners were still a bit burnt. He couldn’t even restore a photograph to its full state. He wrote their names down beside the photo and then:

_The night before we fought the Devil. And lost. November, 2009._

With careful attention to detail, he hid his work behind layers of tired dust and tucked the forgotten photo album back among its unfriendly neighbors. Bobby would probably never find what he had done. Likely as not, none of them would survive to find out. 

But maybe to somebody one day who found this album, they’d be more than just strangers in and old book.

**Author's Note:**

> Updating and adding my old Supernatural fics.


End file.
